Earthly Paradise(2010) for chorus and orchestra

BBC commission, premiered at the Barbican London in April 2010, by the BBC sympphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis

Duration: 43 minutes

Lo, from our loitering ship at last
A new land to be seen ...

Earthly Paradise is cast in four large scale sections like the movements of a symphony.
It contrasts extracts from The Hill of Venus (the last of Morris’s huge collection of verse tales The Earthly Paradise)
with three other shorter poems: The Doomed Ship (memories of the love triangle between Morris, his wife Jane and Dante Gabriel Rossetti); O Dwellers on the Lovely Earth (which might be a kind of “Ecological Warning”); and Iceland First Seen (see above quote), which recounts the frisson Morris felt on first arriving in what he called “The Holy Land.”